Silly me, I was looking for truth
outside my window...............
Turns out you can find it right inside the sill if you look close enough.
Plus it seems to have its origins in the USA, no wonder why we Americans sometimes tend to think we are the center of it all.
There seems to be a common thought that
art reveals the truth and that truth & beauty are closely
associated. This way of thinking has always confused me. Let those who have an aversion to others expressing random philosophical thoughts be warned before reading the following.
If
one thinks of truth as "the whole picture" then truth is composed of
infinite points of view (not just the one taken in a singular work,
no matter how complete a view). In this manner the truth is unknowable
to the individual who is bound by the limitations of their senses and
viewpoint. I just read an article about vision in birds which discussed how much of the light spectrum their eyes can see (like UV light) which we cannot. (Thinking about this I made a futile attempt to imagine what a Vermeer painting must look like to a crow.) If beauty lies in the eye of the beholder then it is just one aspect of the whole.
However, a piece of art may expand one's viewpoint by one (and if you are lucky that viewpoint might look a little different each time you come back to it). I do not mean to trivialize this in any way, just to point out the
possible smallness of our grasp of truth in the larger scheme of the
universe.
Maybe
as mortals (like the movie line) "we can't handle the
truth". There is a part in the Bhagavad Gita which illustrates this I think. I do not know much about Hindu writings but from what I have attempted to read of this text a warrior named Arjuna stands at a battlefield conversing with the god Krishna before the conflict begins. Arjuna expresses his doubts and feelings about the war to come to Krishna. At one point Arjuna asks Krishna to be able to see him in his non-human form. Krishna obliges and shows Arjuna a glimpse of himself and the universe; the experience of which is awe-inspiring but also overwhelming and frightening to Arjuna. This idea of truth being composed of many view points is what I now see when
I come across the pictures of Hindu gods with their multiple eyes,
faces, and limbs.
In the Western world I know, society's version of beauty is often presented by altering & avoiding showing the real in its raw form---we are surrounded by polished ads,
movies, and video games. By now many of us have experienced the oxymoron of "reality TV". Reality is what you make it when you
don't have all the info. Maybe the "truth" is that we never will be privy to all the info in physical form.
OK enough philosophy talk for now--sorry if this line went a little further than just a walk.
